Humours Of Listowel: A Song History
The name "The Humours of Listowel" belongs to more than one Irish dance tune; the Traditional Tune Archive gives it as an alternate title of a D-major polka from the Sliabh Luachra region on the Cork–Kerry border.[1] That polka is also known as "Dan O'Leary's," "Captain Maguire" and "Babes in the Woods."[1][2] By the account of the accordion player Johnny O'Leary, he got the tune from his uncle, Dan O'Leary, who in turn had it from Tom Billy Murphy, father of the fiddler Denis Murphy, rather than from Pádraig O'Keeffe.[1]
Accordion, various materials, 1870–80. A nineteenth-century accordion, shown for the instrument of the players named here; it has no connection to them.
The earliest trace of the polka in the sources consulted here is a 1924 recording by McConnell's Four Leaf Shamrocks, with the fiddler Adam McConnell, which Topic reissued in 1995 on the CD Irish Dance Music.[2][3] Paul Deloughery printed it in Sliabh Luachra on Parade in 1980.[2] Johnny O'Leary's own setting, recorded at Na Píobairí Uilleann in October 1984, appears in Moylan's 1994 book Johnny O'Leary of Sliabh Luachra.[1] O'Leary recorded it on a 1995 album of dance music from the Cork–Kerry border, and the accordionist Brendan Begley played it with three other musicians on the 1997 album Beginish.[3]
The other "Humours of Listowel" is a jig in A Dorian, and the earliest source the Traditional Tune Archive gives for it is the mid-nineteenth-century manuscript collection of James Goodman (1828–1896), a Church of Ireland clergyman and uilleann piper who gathered music in Cork and other parts of Munster.[4] That jig is No. 431 in the first volume of Tunes of the Munster Pipers, the 1998 edition of the Goodman manuscripts edited by Hugh and Lisa Shields and published by the Irish Traditional Music Archive, which has the score online.[4][5][6] Aaron O'Rourke's Irish Session Tunes, Volume 1, published by Fingers Of Steel, sets 36 tunes that are staples of Irish sessions for mountain dulcimer, adds a brief introduction to session playing and Irish ornamentation, and comes with an MP3 demo of each tune; its table of contents lists "Humours of Listowel" among the polkas, not the jigs.[7]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Dan O'Leary's (2)".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Babes in the Woods (2)".
- irishtune.info: "Babes in the Woods".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Humors of Listowel (2)".
- Irish Traditional Music Archive: "Humours of Listowel" (Tunes of the Munster Pipers 1).
- Irish Traditional Music Archive: "Tunes of the Munster Pipers 1 B".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Aaron O'Rourke, Irish Session Tunes, Volume 1".
- Image: Accordion, various materials, 1870–80. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.